Microsoft Apologises For BPOS Outage That Shut Down Its Exchange Platform

Microsoft has apologised for the massive BPOS outage it suffered last week, which blocked Microsoft Exchange services for users.

The outage, which only affected the BPOS services in North and South America, caused emails to be delivered after 6-9 hours of being sent.

In a blog post, Dave Thompson, corporate vice president of Microsoft Online Services, apologised about the glitch and gave a detailed explanation of what had happened.

“On Tuesday and today we experienced three separate service issues that impacted customers served from our Americas data center. All of these issues have been resolved and the service is now running smoothly,” he said, The Seattle Times reports.

“I’d like to apologize to you, our customers and partners, for the obvious inconveniences these issues caused,” he added.

The BPOS outage began last Tuesday and users were unable to read, write or send emails. Those who were able to do so, had their emails delivered several hours late.

According to the company, the BPOS-S Exchange service suffered a blockage due to malformed email traffic. The company explained that the service is capable of handling such traffic but failed to do so due to an ‘obscure’ case.

The company also apologised for not informing their users about the issue in greater detail and promised to do so in the future.